Exchange Server

Virtual Instance of Exchange 2010 with Virtual Edge Server

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This project consisted of Three virtual machines hosted on VMware ESXi. The exchange server was set up to replace a POP3 mail service hosted by an ISP

The first was the primary exchange server. Using Exchange 2010 this server was spec'd out for 100 users. All users where configured with an Archive mailbox (a new feature in 2010) There were three disks configured, one for the OS one for the primary mailbox DB and one for the Archive DB.

The second was an running in a DMZ with the Exchange Edge role and was used only to send and receive SMTP messages to the outside world

The third server was running a program called Epicenter Server. The sole purpose of this software was to sync a copy of the GAL into the users personal mailbox contacts list. This allowed us to push the company contacts to mobile devices via active-sync, and ensure everyone always had an up to date copy.

The project worked well, but ran into a few issues. The main issue was caused by users wanting to keep every piece of old mail they had ever sent or received in the last 20 years via the old services. All users where using outlook, so to migrate the mail we collected the users PST files and simply imported them (one at a time) into exchange via powershell. This worked well enough but for some users old mail would import but not display correctly afterwords. We never did find a good solution except to purge the trouble mailbox's and make the users start from scratch. (There PST were kept of course but in an offline archive) The users with the most issues where the same users that insisted on keeping the most old mail. In one case over 20GB worth for a single users.

All in all the project went well and proved to be a very reliable and effective solution. Exchange 2010 was a huge improvement over the old POP3 mail service